Pause and effect: Author Pico Iyer talks silences and wildfires, in an exclusive Wknd interview
He was 34, adds the British-born author and journalist of Indian origin, when a California wildfire burned his childhood home to the ground in 1991. His mother was away from her home when she lost everything; he fled with just what he was wearing, and their cat.
With nowhere to go, a friend suggested a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur. There, he says, after journeying and writing about far-flung countries such as North Korea, Paraguay, Japan and Bhutan, he finally made the journey within.
What he found, and began to hold sacred, was a pulsating silence.
The books that followed were of a different kind. Iyer, author of the bestselling Falling off the Map (1993) and Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) wrote The Art of Stillness (2014) and The Half Known Life (2023).
His new book, Learning from Silence (February; Penguin Random House India), traces that first inner journey at Big Sur, a place he has returned to scores of times since. Expect meditations on meditation in his trademark Spartan prose, but also musings on joy, and encounters with the poet and singer Leonard Cohen. Excerpts from an interview.
* What is silence?
It’s the place on the far side of our thoughts and assumptions and ideologies. The place where our truest self and the deepest reality lie…
At a time when the whole world is so divided, it seemed particularly useful right now to throw a spotlight on silence because it’s our words that cut us in two. And I think it’s often our silences that bring us together in some deeper identity where we’re connected rather than at odds.
The silence I’m talking about is not just an absence of noise, but a very particular kind of positive presence that I have found in monasteries and convents everywhere in the world.
Being silent on a mountaintop or on a deserted beach is wonderful, but this active, wide-awake silence is something even beyond that.
* Even before the fire, at 29, you left a successful journalistic career in New York and moved to Japan…
Having been to Japan a few brief times, I could see it was a more inward-looking society.
The idea was to get as far from New York as possible and open the door to a radically different way of seeing the world. I’ve now been in Japan 37 years, and I am living quite a bit the life I conceived of then: simple, uncluttered, in the middle of nowhere.
I’ve always had a longing for monastic places in the way some people will see cheesecake or a bottle of whiskey and feel a great pull.
* How has this life of minimalism altered your writing?
I think there’s much more silence in the writing than there used to be. I think Japan has been a training in uncluttering.
If you compare my first book with this book, the main difference is there’s much more white space; and with the few words that emerge, the hope is that you can feel the silence like a deep well beneath them.
Working on this book, over 34 years, I’d accumulated about 4,000 pages of notes. Eventually, I tried to make each passage almost a parable: very, very brief, but archetypal, out of time.
So many of us are caught up in a world of rush and distraction. I’m trying to offer release from that by writing in a very slow, human-paced way. Some readers have told me that, as they’re racing from one place to another, they pick up this book and it slows them down and even calms them down.
* Is it strange that some of this change, for you, has come in the wake of wildfires?
I’ve lived with wildfires all my life. When my family moved from Oxford to California in 1965, we moved to Coyote Road where, just a couple of months earlier, a wildfire had devastated all the houses. We were living next to the ashes and rubble.
In those days, fires of that kind occurred maybe every 15 or 20 years; now it’s more like every 15 or 20 months.
The monastery where I go has been through four or five pretty devastating fires in the time I’ve known it. When I flew into California last month and drove up to our rebuilt house, it was to find it pitch-dark, with no phone service, because the winds were so high and authorities assumed a fire could break out close to our house any moment.
Unfortunately, we’ve grown really conditioned to it because we’re living where humans were never meant to live. Anyone who’s in the Californian hills knows that that landscape needs fire as a cleansing agent and for the regrowth of so much. Which means we have to face the question: How can we live with fire?
* How have you lived with fire?
By being humbled, I hope, and not taking anything for granted.
For many years after our house was rebuilt, anyone who walked through the front door was greeted by six full suitcases. My mother was permanently packed, ready to evacuate. All her recent photos, mementos and important papers were in those six suitcases.
The one big change I made after our house burned down, because I do all my writing by hand, was to keep all my notes in a safety deposit box in the bank.
These fires cure us of the assumption that we’re the centre of the world. They remind us we’re at the mercy of much larger forces.
* You write about meeting Leonard Cohen at a Zen Buddhist monastery…
I first met him in 1995, while he was living as a Zen monk in the high mountains of Los Angeles. I had been listening to his songs since boyhood, so he’d been a hero of mine for decades already. But when I met him, he had so disappeared into his ragged robes that I didn’t recognise him.
He had more or less erased the entity that the world knows as Leonard Cohen. We quickly connected, because I’d spent a lot of time in monasteries already; we could speak the same silence.
It made a great impression on me that this man of 61, who could be doing anything in the world, had chosen this backbreaking regimen of scrubbing floors and shovelling snow and taking his aged teacher to the doctor. It was inspiring and humbling.
Later I would go and spend time with him in his house in Los Angeles. When he died, I travelled from Japan just for a day to speak at his Zen funeral. He really occupied a special place in my heart.
* The monastery as an institution is undergoing a fair amount of change, particularly in the US…
I am really worried about that. In the US, for example, there are a lot of yoga centres and new-age retreat houses, but most of them are built around a single individual who is mortal or a single philosophy that excludes those who don’t subscribe to it. Most are not based on a single, unwavering, lifelong commitment.
Meanwhile, monasteries and convents around the world are closing. I don’t know what the answer is, and the monks by their nature aren’t necessarily concerned by any of this. They see the larger picture and know that tides rise and fall.
* There is love, joy, grief in the book…
It was a very deliberate decision on my part to include a lot of death in the book, and to include a lot of joy, because I feel we can’t afford to neglect either. We can’t look away from the reality of impermanence, and we can’t look away from the reality of beauty and the many reasons for gratitude.
Most of my work, for many books now, has been about holding those two in balance.
The central question, not just of the book, but of most of our lives now, is how we remain hopeful amid the imperatives of today. How we remain calm in the face of mounting uncertainty. So the book, at one level, is about how can we acknowledge the difficulty and suffering of any life and yet not give up on hope and not overlook the many causes for rejoicing that still remain.
Source link
